Now (August 25, 2025)

Hi, my name is Renee Tougas. This is my variation on the Now page.

Click here for the bread crumb trail of old About & Now pages.

May 2025

I am a midlife, empty nester, veteran homeschooling mom of 3 young adults; a recent transplant to Lunenburg County, NS from Montreal, QC, where I lived with my family for 9 years. Before that we lived other places. You can read those stories here.

I live with my husband and best friend (same person), across the driveway from more best friends and companions - my parents - with whom I share garden tools, daily texts and in-person chats, berry picking excursions, walks at the beach, and Sunday evening dinners. (Currently, my brother also lives on the property though he isn’t a permanent resident here.)

I love to read, think, and write. I love making home and especially excel at system development, management, and organization. I am fiercely loyal to my people.

I photograph beautiful things, like my garden and landscapes, and things that bring me joy or comfort. One of my deepest sources of both joy and comfort is home.

I love to travel and road trip, to go on adventures, especially in wild and natural places.

I’ve been blogging here for almost 21 years. I like having this home on the Internet and this record of my thoughts, personal growth, and family life.

My blog writing is a mash-up of spiritually-orientated, deep thinking, personal, and cultural analysis with lifestyle and memoirist storytelling. If it sounds like a mouthful, it is. Consequently, my posts have gotten longer and harder to publish with regular frequency. And because of that I had been microblogging, as I like to call it, on IG Stories since 2021.

Then, in the summer of 2025 (kind of on a whim) I started a publishing at Substack in an attempt to relocate my practice of writing and sharing daily morning greetings from Instagram to something more permanent, searchable, linkable and less algorithm driven.

As much as I love my blog, after a long spell of feeling bogged down in publishing here, I am delighting in the tight turnaround and ease of publishing to Substack, where right now I post four to five times a week, just like the good ol' days of blogging.

I also have a YouTube channel where I share stories from my life.

After retiring from homeschooling in 2020 when our youngest started junior college (she’s now graduated from her Bachelors), I went to grad school and this past spring I graduated with a Master's of Arts degree. While in school I published my first article to a peer-reviewed, academic journal.

Homeschooling was a big part of my life for many years (3 kids all the way through) and education philosophies, practices, and policies are enduring interests. Hence the Master's Degree in Educational Studies.

I work as a freelance administrative assistant in online content creation, social media marketing, membership site development and management, customer care, and general online research and problem-solving related to these things.

As I summarize on my LinkedIn profile:

I bring together deep experience in communications and content creation, education program design and delivery, and operational management of digital platforms, content, events, and projects. Across all roles, I emphasize and build member/customer/student care and experience, human-friendly systems, and supportive environments.

You can get a practical sense for my paid work from my professional portfolio.

Except for talking about my freelance work and clients, all the above is featured in my writing (which you'll find these days at Substack).

Living in Nova Scotia; intergenerational family life; pretty photos; adventures & travels; personal, philosophical, spiritual and sociological essays; thoughts on education and homeschooling - this is where I am now and what you'll experience here.

For regular posting, check out my Substack.

A quick note about the comments function here: they don't work but you can comment at Substack or email me directly renee@tougas.net.